So, Barry Rohrssen is mulling an offer to join John Calipari’s staff at Kentucky. It is apparently about the money. He’d take a demotion from HC at Manhattan and leave the area he is from to live in Lexington and recruit NY/NJ with Orlando Antigua. Looks like the money for assistants in college basketball is starting to climb closer and closer to the price tags for college football coordinators.
Here’s a short, look at who is back/best for each Big East team (though, it still includes Flynn from Syracuse). Hate to say it, but WVU could very well be the best team in the Big East in 2010.
You could pay to get yelled at by Bob Huggins at his fantasy camp. Only $3000 and a two shot minimum.
An interview with Big East official Mike Kitts.
Mike Kitts: I don’t like to talk to coaches a lot. Unless I have a play — I call ’em a 50-50 or a ‘tweener.’ (Block-charge, for example.) Where something has to be said. I’ll say, ‘This is the way I saw it. You might have seen it totally different, but this is the way I saw it.’
Those things need to be explained during the game. There are other plays where I’m 100 percent right; I don’t have to explain anything. I like talking to the players. If I get those guys on my side, for the most part, the kids in Division I basketball are phenomenal. They’re good kids. They want to win. You can talk to them.
DD: When you say ‘Get them on my side,’ what do you mean by that?
MK: When there’s a free throw being taken and I’ve got, say Levance Fields next to me, I’ll say, ‘How would you like to referee this game?’ And he’ll say, ‘No, this is not easy, Mr. Kitts.’ Just let them know how difficult the job is. And if you have a problem with a particular kid, you can go to the captain on the team.
DD: And what do you view as a problem?
MK: Well, what we’re seeing a lot of now is the stuff with the pounding the chest, the unsporting acts that they want us to call now. Getting in your face on a dunk. The coach comes back and tells us, ‘The kid’s just excited because he made a nice play.’ But during the course of the game, I have to have composure as an official, the coaches have to have composure and the players have to have composure.
And if they don’t have composure, we have a rule to take care of that. For the most part, I’m probably a guy that leans the other way. I’ll talk to the kid before I tech him up. Unless it’s so blatant there’s nothing else I can do but tech him up.
Testing the NBA Draft waters for juniors is not as easy as it used to be in today’s economy. Starting next year, it’s going to be harder. The NCAA is poised to go with the push from the ACC to have the deadline to pull out set for May 8 — before most NBA teams would have a chance to work out or camp undecided underclassmen.
Count Coach Jamie Dixon among those who does not like the new rule that bans coaches from attending AAU tournaments in April.
College coaches spent the first three days this week on the road, bouncing from one high school to another to make up for missing events over the weekend. Saturday and Sunday were live recruiting days, but with few players home, the weekend was considered a waste.
“I was a big proponent of being able to go out [on the weekend to the events] but I know a lot of coaches were against it for their own reasons,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. “I don’t understand how the smaller schools voted against it, too.”
The reason the April evaluation period appealed to smaller schools was because it enabled them to save money and evaluate a large pool of players in one place. That’s something Wojcik said he would do when he was at the Naval Academy.
As usual, the rules end up helping the bigger name coaches and programs.
Recruiting controls and limits on testing the NBA draft waters reminds me of most campaign funding reforms. Ostensibly content neutral and supposed to level things and make them cleaner. Inevitably, they favor the incumbents and entrenched interests that have the name recognition and better access to money.
The next round of the SEC/Big East Invitational has been announced. Once again, no Pitt participation. Not really bothered about not taking part this year since it is Pitt’s rebuilding/reloading year. The headline game will be UConn-Kentucky at Madison Square Garden. They finally got around to start building an official website for it.
That means Pitt will be in next year’s set. Right now, that means the possible opponents from the SEC — assuming that it won’t be any from this year’s or last year’s group — South Carolina, Alabama, Auburn or LSU. Though, it should be noted that Mississippi State was in the 2008 and will be again in 2009.
Presumably, Pitt will go to a SEC-neutral sight since the other 3 teams from the BE that not participated are Rutgers, Seton Hall and ND. Rutgers and Seton Hall seem likely to stay and host in NJ.
No. Jim Boeheim at Syracuse did not try to push out Paul Harris and Eric Devendorf. Why would anyone think that?
“We lost three starters but I’ll take Wesley Johnson over Paul Harris and Andy Rautins over Eric Devendorf,” Boeheim said. “In some ways, Triche will be better for us. He’s really good.”
Boeheim went on to praise Johnson, saying that he’s “the real deal, he’s really, really good.” Boeheim said the confusion with Harris about him declaring for the draft was a miscommunication. When Boeheim said Harris was going to declare for the draft, Harris interpreted that as meaning Boeheim had actually turned in the paperwork. He said that didn’t happen. According to Boeheim, Harris intends to declare for the draft by Sunday’s deadline. Devendorf does as well.
Lovely.
